Best Actress Corrective Drive Volume 1

Unlike many of my favorite bloggers, I am not an actressexual. I unjustly ignore the finest females the Oscars have to offer. There are two notable holes in my Oscar obsession: Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. To put it bluntly, in numbers: I've seen 72% of the Best Supporting Actors but only 65% of the Best Supporting Actresses, and 73% of the Best Actors but a lowly 59% of the Best Actresses. The "why" is easy: the Best Picture nominees, which have been my primary focus, contain more solid, nomination-attracting roles for men than they do for women, and I'm not especially drawn to the kinds of films that tend to earn lone Best Actress nominations. But I'm in the process of repenting by making a concerted effort to watch enough of my remaining Best Actress nominees that I don't have to feel ashamed when the Oscar conversation comes around to percentages (and it always does).

So far, the results have been iffy: one pretty darned good, if overpraised, performance in a film that made me want to throw things at my TV; one nearly unwatchable performance in a film that is nearly unbearable; and an intermittently great performance in a patchy, made-for-TV-style film. Finally, though, a pioneering women-in-prison flick saved me from utter despair.

Diane Lane, Unfaithful (2002)
Lost to Nicole Kidman, The Hours
Performance: 3 goats, film: 0.5 goats

Although she gives it her all, Diane Lane can't save Unfaithful from its need to pin all the problems of the world on women's unfettered sexuality. No, I'm not overstating the case: this film actually sees a moral equivalency between a woman intentionally an affair and a man murdering his wife's lover. "What did you do?" a horrified Lane asks her husband Richard Gere; "What did you do?" he shoots back, and the film is on his side. That said, Lane's performance is half showy and half naturalistic. There are the obvious "Oscar scenes," like her hundred-expression trip down memory lane on the way home from her first assignation and the aforementioned horror at hubby, during which she shows a nice range of mannerisms that all the same announce themselves as mannerisms. She's better in the loose, playful (though sometimes borderline-idiotic) seduction scenes, in which she's basically the only actor in the film, as Olivier Martinez gives her as much to play off as a sculpture would.

Maggie McNamara, The Moon Is Blue (1953)
Lost to herself Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday
Performance: 2.5 goats; film: 2 goats

Maggie McNamara is in full Audrey Hepburn-as-plucky innocent mode; if, by the last reel, you're not calling her "Audrey" in your head, you're a better movie watcher than I. McNamara would have been fine, I guess, if Hepburn hadn't already hoed this row. She's playing a naïf who produces "shocking" statements about sexuality to the delight and/or horror of those surrounding her. Childlike in deportment, dress, and speech, she produces "virgin," "seduce," and "mistress" for the first time on movie screens, but the conceit of her character softens the blow each time: it's a shock, I suppose, but it's the shock of a child asking her mommy "what's intercourse?" instead of the knowing and subversive shock I think the playwright intended. The film repeatedly trips over its self-conscious daring, and William Holden reminds me again why I hate him, with few exceptions, between Sunset Blvd. and The Wild Bunch.

Jane Alexander, Testament (1983)
Lost to Shirley MacLaine, Terms of Endearment
Performance: 3 goats; film: 2.5 goats

I'm going to join the small but distinguished group of people (OK, one other person and his household) who don't share the adoration of Jane Alexander's performance or her film Testament, the tale of domestic nuclear apocalypse that was made for TV but released in theaters. The film itself is barely competent: it contains some great scenes, and then huge misfires, especially that cemetery kiss, the teddy bear hunt, and the gimmicky late-movie reveal of Daddy Devane's Final Call. Blech. Alexander's performance is the best thing in it, but it's a careful, studied performance in search of a real movie to inhabit, and nearly sunk by two ill-advised scenes of histrionics (see above). She's so much better at shell-shocked waiting and quiet determination than she is at screeching. Her performance is clearly the weakest of the '83 nominees I've seen (although I haven't seen Educating Rita).

Eleanor Parker, Caged (1950)
Lost to Billie Holliday, Born Yesterday
Performance: 4 goats; film: 4 goats

And finally, an outstanding film featuring most of a great performance: Eleanor Parker plays a naive girl processed by a corrupt prison machinery into a hardened crook. By "most of a good performance," I mean that the beginning and the ending are exceptional; it's the middle that's lacking. Parker transforms from a quaking child into a flinty con (with a weird but stunning stopover in Falconetti-as-Joan of Arc territory) over the space of a single scene change: she's denied parole, she freaks out, and then she's a spitting tigress, trading hair-pulls with Hope Emerson's formidable prison matron. But it's too sudden; there's no buildup to the transformation. This is more the screenplay's fault than Parker's, of course—given the script's limitations, Parker's inclusion in the best Best Actress lineup in Oscar history (Baxter and Davis in All About Eve, Swanson in Sunset Blvd., and winner Holliday in Born Yesterday) is well deserved.